Me, Myself, and Color

If you ask anyone who has known me longer than a month, they'd tell you that I love color. My mother, a quilter, loves when I'm home, because I can help her pick fabric for her projects. Though she's in incredible crafts-person, colors confound her and so she turns to me. In addition, my various bedrooms over the course of my life (extending into college) have had one important thing in common: they look like a schizophrenic five year old decorated them, which is to say they have all been very colorful.

As I've aged, however, I've (to an extent) gotten away from the barrage of different shades and patterns on one surface, and started to recognize the simple beauty of minimalism. And when I say minimalism, I don't mean the weird abstract paintings that are one solid color but go for thirty thousand dollars a pop, but the use of accent colors. Remember when there was a big black and white except for one thing fad going on? Where photos would be completely black and white except for one accent image in full color, usually something red, like a rose? Yeah, I really like that.

In fact, I tend to dress similarly, insofar as I wear one article of very bright clothing, like an undershirt or a pair of bright Converse, and then compliment it with duller colors of pants and cardigans. Example: A red tank top with plain jeans and a dark gray cardigan. Highlighting a bright color with duller ones is something I really find appealing. I find that this carries over into my photography and editing style, highlighting a bright color and contrasting it with duller surroundings. Sometimes that's difficult to do, however.

Speaking of contrast, that's another thing I find myself doing, especially in photoshop; upping the contrast between colors and the darker (and less important) surroundings. I find that darkening shadows and really differentiating between the various colors in a picture really helps bring out the details. Take these photos, for example. There is a very obvious and beautiful pattern on the paper crane that is washed out in the original version, but upping the contrast and the blacks slightly helps it, arguably the most interesting part of the picture, stand out.

I tend to shy away from altering saturation too much, although in this particular case I think I increased it a bit to help the colors on the paper stand out better. On the whole, however, I find that simply playing with the amount of light on certain parts of the picture is more useful in bringing out the vibrancy of color than saturation.

Overall, the takeaway is that I love color, but I understand that too much of it lessens its impact and overstimulates the viewer. All I can hope is that I don't let my tendency towards the insane overpower my appreciation of the simple.